Perimeter: services totally naive to authentication and authorization. It is assumed that no bad actors could open a connection in the first place. If you are i

Perimeter: services totally naive to authentication and authorization. It is assumed that no bad actors could open a connection in the first place. If you are in the office or on VPN, you’re good. Perhaps there are broad compartments like different rooms in the office or different firewall profiles loaded by the VPN. Proxy (BeyondCorp): services remain naive but employees and offices are evicted from the trusted network. Employee requests go to the proxy, which checks authentication and authorization before passing along the trusted network to services. Services and potentially engineers/SREs who can get on the production network can still make whatever requests they like. Zero Trust: all services on the production network authenticate all requests. Even if you are root on a production box you would need tokens/certs to get useful responses from other services on the same production network segment. I entered the industry at a “proxy” company that is pushing towards zero trust. It’s hard to believe that the “perimeter” model is real. But you look at something like Target getting owned by thermostats in its stores that merely needed internet access, it is clear that some enterprises do work that way.